The Power of First Steps

Want a foolproof way of making the right decisions, understanding the world correctly, never missing details, and always knowing who to trust?

That’s a pretty big promise, and would certainly be hard to live up to 100% of the time, because expecting ourselves to always be at our best isn’t really a fair demand. However, the following works 100% of the time, if we’re just able to apply it.

As the climax of How to Make Good Decisions While Still Being You will explain (when finished, spoiler alert), making correct decisions, opinions, judgment calls, conclusions, etc., always comes back to being you and working with the way your mind works, not anybody else’s. Why? Because of the power and potency of first cognitive steps.

And in fact your entire cognitive process works with machine like elegance, if you’ll just get out of its way. The first two steps work in sync, the transition between the first and second half of the cognition process is seamless, and if you let it, your last step can show you things in a beautiful, upside-down sort of way that can demonstrate things others would have missed…but only if you stop short circuiting the whole thing.

Your first step is where your mind dances when nobody’s looking, your mind’s home base and watchtower. It’s a place of perspective, understanding, hope, and direction, no matter which Toi it is for you. It’s your greatest love and where your mind wants to hang out, whether or not you feel like that’s allowed.

Most of us feel the pressure to belittle our first steps. Maybe we feel like our favorite Toi isn’t practical enough, or meaningful enough; maybe we feel like it’s too specialized or not specialized enough. We’re likely to feel like other ways of thinking just work better, or are more accepted by others, and try to emulate them at the expense of our own.

But this does not work. Ever.

Even as much as we try to be someone else, whether consciously or not, the physics of our minds will not cooperate. You love that first step Toi too much, even if you feel safer pretending that you don’t. Your mind will keep returning there anyway, without your bidding.

Because first steps are natural, we don’t have to try to do them any more than we have to try to exist or be human. You had cognition before you took your first breath (read about Facial Typing for more on that). You don’t have to try to first-step. You don’t have to think about how to think.

Your first step happens, whether or not you tell it to.

But where you can succeed or mess up, is by deciding what to do with the information your first step is telling you. It’s always there, feeding your lake of understanding like a constant waterfall of insights, but you can choose what else to throw in the lake, gunking up something that could be pure and springfed.

And that’s what happens when we ignore the information our first step is telling us, usually because it makes us uncomfortable in some way. We stick our fingers in our mental ears because we don’t want to see the reality that our first step is demonstrating to us.

Whether it makes us feel unsafe, or disappoints us about ourselves or others, sometimes truth hurts and we’d rather ignore it, even if that throws a wrench in the wheels of our mental process.

And once we start ignoring what our first step is telling us, we immediately feel off-step (no pun intended). Our sense of balance feels off, as our go-to way of understanding the world has suddenly become cut off to us, by our own mental decree, and we suddenly feel self-conscious and defensive, knowing we’re not at our best.

And when we feel defensive, our automatic response is to cover up our flank, protect our caboose, where we know we’re the most vulnerable. And so we obsess over our last-steps, hang out in our minds in the place we know we’re the weakest, in the vain hope that we can protect ourselves from the taunting voices over our shoulders that say because we have weaknesses at all, we will never be enough.

So although it only makes things worse, makes us trip and feel unknown and unwanted for who we really are, sometimes we stay in butt-protection-mode for days, months, years or even decades at a time, hoping that “this time for sure” if we just squeeze and force ourselves a little bit more to be someone that we’re not, surely then our lives will feel complete, surely then we’ll be in control and feel capable and like our lives aren’t trying to kill us, for once.

We live at our worst, succumbing to the despair that that’s “just the way it is™”.

But we can short circuit the negative cycle more simply than we think. It may still hurt, because it’ll require looking at the things that we ran away from in the first place. But as soon as we take a hard look at what our first step is trying to show us, we’ll feel immediate change.

If we actually go through the pain of letting our minds return to where they wanted to be in the first place, everything will become clearer, more balanced, and with worlds more perspective. We’ll feel like ourselves again, and that’s where power truly lies.

And this is true of all four, exquisitely equal, Types of Information. If EJs will just let in where they see consequences leading, even if it means that their group is making the wrong decisions. If EPs will just let in the character judgments they see, even if they don’t know what to do about their friends not being as great as they hoped. If IJs will just let in true principles of how the world always works, even if it means seeing that the world they’ve strive to build their entire lives is broken and flawed. If IPs will just let in the details and questions that might completely overthrow the current, safer, conclusion.

Truth is often painfully disappointing in the short term, but incomparably freeing in the long term.

Balance of all 4Toi is absolutely essential, however we can’t even begin to see what balance is unless we go back to our own home base for understanding and perspective. We are never going to have a handle on our last step, until we approach it from our first, using the beautiful interworkings of our mind’s streamlined inner physics as intended, instead of swimming against our own psychological currents, drowning in our own doubt, confusion and self-deprecation.

I said in The Cognition Process in Stick Figures that you’re always going to suck at your last step, which in a way is true; it will always hold up the rear, so you will always suck at it more than you suck at your other steps, lol. However, you can get to a place where your last step is no longer scary, where you feel competent in your last Toi and like your caboose won’t derail you. But that place is only achievable by going back to base, taking back the mothership, returning to your roots, getting back to the core.

Who you are wants your first step, your psyche desperately craves permission to love the things it loves the most, and have everything contribute back to your most beloved pursuits. Not only will you be happier if you’re being yourself, your life and the precious things in it can’t afford for you to be anyone else.

Laconic:
Always go back to what your first step is telling you. Everything else will literally follow.

Explained Further In: